1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of pixel rendering, in particular to the field of rendering textured spheres and spherical environment maps.
2. Description of the Related Art
Pixel rendering refers to the generation of pixel values for displaying an image. An environment map is an image or collection of images which characterize the appearance of a scene when viewed from a particular position. Each type of environment map has an associated projection which is used to compute the appearance along a ray traveling in a particular direction towards the camera. Not all types of environment maps capture the scene in every direction.
A variety of different forms of environment maps have been used in the past. An orthographic projection of a reflecting sphere to characterize the illumination of a scene is described by Williams in "Pyramidal Parametrics", Computer Graphics, Vol. 17, No. 3, pgs. 1-11, July, 1983. The intention was to use the environment map as an aid to the rapid computation of specular reflections. In an article by Greene entitled "Environment Mapping and Order Applications of Worlds Projections", IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 6, No. 11, pgs. 21-29, November, 1986, six images on the faces of a cube are used for a "cubic environment map". This mapping was used to resample synthetic images of a scene to be redisplayed in the form of an Omnimax wide angle lens projection system as well as for the computation of reflections.